


hair of the mabari

by magesamell



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Mania and Depression, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, References to Sex, an aeneid reference, hawke laughing things off she really shouldn't, nothing good ever happens in the fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 01:52:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4203459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magesamell/pseuds/magesamell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When all seems totally futile, she laughs."<br/>Hawke in the underworld in the weeks after Fenris leaves and before the Arishok duel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hair of the mabari

_but always up the mountainside you’re clambering,_

_groping blindly, hungry for anything;_

_picking through your pocket linings —_

_well, what is this?_

_scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?_

 

\- o - 

 

The door clicks behind him, and Hawke sighs. She’d been holding her breath, anticipating. Ever since he’d opened up under her lips there had been an unfurling question, a sweetness that threatened to overwhelm, a delicious whisper at the back of her mind — _what if what ifwhatif_ —

And now, now is her answer. He has left; she is alone. It feels much like it always has.

She almost wants to cry from boredom. Abandoned, again? Oh, she’s getting _tired_ of it.

 

\- o -

She wakes up bright and early the next morning; she assembles an emergency patrol of the Wounded Coast. She kills several spiders and two unsuspecting groups of bandits before Aveline asks her why she is so energetic this morning.

Energetic. It’s not the word she would have chosen. It’s not the morning she could have chosen. She contemplates wallowing for hours in her four-poster, sex-smelling bed and wipes the blood from her face with a shit-eating grin.

“It’s a beautiful day for wholesale slaughter.”

“That it is. I can’t even complain that this was a useless excursion — we’ve got those bandits that were pestering the east road.” Aveline smiles at her, claps her on the shoulder. “It’s good sometimes to escape the four walls, isn’t it?”

Hawke thinks of walls and houses and bedrooms and doors and — laughs — through her smarting, tear-pricked eyes — Hawke thinks: _yes_ , it is good.

 

\- o -

 

For a good few days Hawke makes remarkable progress on her ever-expansive list of responsibilities to her city. She mops the streets with her good intentions; she does her best to pluck the dirt out of the city’s crevices, purify its soul. Sebastian compliments her efforts, calls her determined. But her energy only carries her so far. At some point she crosses the threshold where she has accomplished all she can do in one day — at some she can only wait for more requests, more correspondence, more intel. 

That’s when she decides to visit the Hanged Man; that’s when she makes a beeline for the bar and announces to Isabela she is _determined_ — to get thoroughly inebriated.

The pirate queen slings an arm around her waist, and with no small amount of mirth announces, “That’s what I like about you, Hawke. Goal-oriented. Straight-forward.”

(Her mind only goes in circles. When she closes her eyes she can rewrite the scene in her mind. No, no, she’d say _this_ this time, and he would stay. She would stand — and she would say, and he —)

\- o -

She wakes on the floor of Isabela’s suite. Everything in her body aches — aches like all of mana has been drained out of her — the fruit of her effort being this moment of bone-deep oppression. The floor is sticky and so is her cheek.

_This is your life now_ , she thinks.

The thought pins her to the floor.

\- o -

She lets her letters pile up after that. Orana and Bodahn and her mother flutter in nervous orbits around her, plucking at her fraying seams — and had she more fire, she would have scolded them for being so insufferable. As it is she lives slowly, allows herself to complete all things with time and deliberation.

There’s no use in rushing head first into things, after all. You had to think. You had to _think_.

(She sits, white knuckled, in the library armchair, book open in lap, wondering if he is reading)

\- o -

Varric seems to know what happened before she tells him; she supposes her instability and surgical avoidance of Fenris is telling enough. He is, after all, a story-teller, a people person by nature. He is, after all, the leader of a spy network, detail oriented by nature. He is, after all, her best friend.

Still they don’t speak of it; no, Varric side-steps emotional pain just as he side-steps arrows, templars, and responsibility — political or familial. Yet Hawke feels no absence — instead she finds her oddest needs satisfied. Orana delivers repaired mail into Hawke's arms, her potions order from Solivitus arrives at her doorstep without a word, and her bar tab inexplicably is nil after a rough night. She doesn’t speak to him about it — even though, she knows, they both could conceivably pluck up the courage to talk about emotion — if pressed. Yet when he invites her to dinner, it’s much easier to laugh and pat his shoulder in unspoken thanks.

But on the night she goes, Hawkes lingers next to the threshold of his suite, pressing her back sharply against the cement wall. Around the doorway, Hawke can hear quite clearly his terse, irritated whisper: the sound of Varric laying it to Isabela about complicating the Qunari situation by leaving Hawke short-handed.

It is no use. Hawke is short handed because she chooses to be so. She wielded the scalpel to make it so; or Fenris did, or maybe they did it together — hand over hand, tearing the page from the storybook.

However it happened, she really doesn’t mind the omission from history. Not all things need be remembered. (this _never_ should have happened in the first place —)

\- o -

She sleeps more than should, and less than she should, and all together irregularly. Some nights she visits the Fade and finds it spastic, overwhelming: waterfalls of green and blue surrounding all of her surroundings, dripping onto her hunched shoulders. Other times she stumbles into a gray and stagnant wasteland; it pools around her, a thousand slow and sluggish arms tugging to pull her under.

And there are the demons. No matter what state the fade takes, the demons come, flocking to her whirring spirit. They march through the fade-seas to torment here; a pilgrimage of lost souls of all sorts. Again and again comes _fear_ — imparting quivering scenes tumbling around her. Carver, on his knees — Bethany, arms outstretched — _Father_ , his eyes cold and accusing.

It always ends with the Wounded Coast. She’s on all fours, in the sand, digging. Every time her fingernails scrape at the sand the hole fills up again. Over and over she tries to dent the ground and over and over the sands overwhelms. Over and over a door slams. Over and over her work is undone.

When all seems totally futile, she laughs until she wakes up.

\- o -

It seems rude to altogether ignore his existence. So she asks Aveline about him, who hears from Donnic, who reports that Fenris is fine, if surly.

Eventually Aveline grows tired of playing carrier pigeon and cuts Hawke a piece of her mind. “You don’t need to have me keeping tabs on him,” the guard captain snaps, running a hand through her hair. Her eyes have not left the report on her desk. “Just talk to him yourself.”

Hawke shifts in her chair. “I’m not so sure he wants to see me right now.”

“But you need to see him. You need him, Hawke. He’s the only person in this blighted city whom the Arishok respects enough to hesitate before scoffing at.”

Hawke swears under her breath, looks away, presses her fingers against her lips. She hates when Aveline’s right and she knows it. Things are much easier when she can ride the coattails of her own stupidity.

When she glances back, Aveline is watching her with pity. “I’m fine,” Hawke blurts without preamble.

Aveline’s mouth twists, and Hawke blinks painfully over bloodshot eyes.

\- o -

It is convenient enough she must ready herself for battle before meeting him again. It is convenient enough she has bloodshed as an excuse to seeing him again. It is convenient enough Fenris knows Qunlat, convenient enough she has a dwarf and a guard-captain flanking her. Convenient enough he accepts her offer, with no argument or delay, and when he does it is —

a relief.

 

\- o -

And if she looks away with more haste than she used to — well, she has her reasons.

\- o -

But the city cannot let her be. It draws her in, begs her to uncover its rocks and behold its ugly heart. It leaves lilies on her doorstep, lilies (white for virgins, for _brides_ , for — death) that call for her to run into the city’s underbelly until she reaches the foul end. She kneels in her mother’s blood, on a dirty floor, in a _filthy_ city — and can comprehend only flashes of it. Red coating her palms. She blinks. Anders, shouting. She blinks. The moonless night sky. She blinks, and Isabela was washing the blood off of her hands in dim candlelight. Aveline was downstairs, hushedly informing Orana — her murmurs just audible over the sloshing water.

At long last Hawke was alone; cocooned by the echoing chambers of the Amell estate. It was as if all the marrow of the world has been sucked from its bones. She looked and could not see, could not hear, there was nothing in the world but the black and white oppression and the acid-sour burn at the back of her throat.

Her fade dreams seeped through her bedroom walls, swirling, surrounding. A crowd. A lightning storm. Flashing — her father, buried. Bethany, overrun. Carver, hating her. And now...mother, blood on pale lips. A sea for lost souls.

She had tried to protect them, she had tried —

But she let down the people she loved. It was her second-nature; her best talent. What had Quentin called it? The strongest force in the universe. Just look at what her love had wrought.

She had dug in the sand, and the sand swept down upon her. She would be buried, too. It was becoming increasingly apparent the Maker wished it so.

“I don’t know what to say, but I am here.” Her gaze swung up to meet him —

\- o -

Fenris is nervous.

Hawke considers herself a pretty good read of body language, and Fenris is radiating all the obvious signs of anxiety. Jaw clenched, hands spasming, and — he keeps shifting his weight from one foot to another. For fuck’s sake, he plays cards. He should know better.

(She should’ve known better: lilies here and lilies there, people don’t just _disappear_ )

Does he mean her to be insulted? He offers his presence, as if that is not the very thing she has most successfully avoided for weeks? What is, after all, the greater hurt? Seeing a perversion of her mother die in her arms or Fenris’ pithy remarks in the face of her grief? The man who abandoned her, come to return awkward platitudes?

A great fucking comfort, he is. Hawke would laugh if she were sure she would not sob once her mouth opened.

But Fenris stands there, straight-backed. Hesitant but determined. Deliberate. By _choice_.

Maybe mother had been right. She had once said — overheard it from a Ferelden matron — the key to illness was the hair of the dog. Place a hair from a Mabari on the wound of its bite and you’d be cured. Like cures like. Heartbreak healing heartbreak.

( _similia similibus curantur_ , her father had said, a sentiment popular in Tevinter, as well —)

All she knows is the pain that had bloomed in her chest when she caught sight of Fenris in her doorway dulled the acid-ache at her throat. All she knows is that she is not truly angry — not at him. All she knows is she really misses him, and he is here, and her family is not.

“Just say something,” she pleads. The mattress shifts as he sits beside her.

“They say...death is but a beginning to a new journey. Does that help?”

( _avernus_ , her father had said, where no birds fly — the gates of the Golden City; until the thousand and one pilgrimages of the magisters turned it Black

we needn’t worry about death’s journey then, she had said, for we are Hawkes)

She lifts her head, meets Fenris’ gaze. They stare soundlessly at each one for one tranquil instant. And with all the grace of a cawing raven, Hawke breaks into a shaking laughter. He greets her hysterics with a grin of his own. Her face hurts from the mania, but Fenris’ smile is knowing and his eyes are bright. His arms catch her collapse, his fingers encircle her jumping shoulders. His shoulders cushion her tears.

\- o -

All things change, when they find purpose. The sweetness dug out of her life returns with the filling sand. Fenris’ palm rubs circles into her back and she thinks — is _this_ what cycles are meant to be? Healing and completion and Fenris, returning? Now, and again — one day, when he faces his devil in battle and emerges from the mulch just as she has done? Hawke can see that smoking horizon, but she is unafraid. All low things rise again, with time. Even them.

Come the dawn Fenris departs from the estate. She watches him pull on his gauntlets from the bed. The red favor darts around as he moves, a flickering fire in the yellow light of the rising sun. Finished with his straps, Fenris approaches the bed. He leans down, holding her gaze with quiet determination, intent alive in his green eyes. He brings her hand to his lips: a silent, dry, instant. Then he relinquishes her. Stands. Leaves.

The door clicks behind him, and Hawke breathes.

 

\- o -

 

_i see the blossoms broke and wet after the rain._

_(little sister, he will be back again)_

_i have washed a thousand spiders down the drain._

_spiders’ ghosts hang, soaked and_

_dangling silently, from all the blooming cherry trees,_

_in tiny nooses, safe from everyone —_

_nothing but a nuisance; gone now, dead and done —_

_be a woman._ be a **woman**

**  
** joanna newsom, _only skin_

 


End file.
